The tale of the Christian Sleepers, popularly known as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, was not always set in Ephesus and the sleepers did not always number seven. Qur’ān 18:9 is an example of the migration of the story to other locales, where regional sermonizers or bards set it in their own town. There, the youth are called “companions of the cave and of Petra (al-Raqīm).” A date in the teens of the seventh century for the Sūrat al-Kahf, where the tale of the sleepers is narrated, is favored by contemporary scholars such as Zishan Ghaffar. This paper will argue that the story is told in the Qur’an to give heart to biblical monotheists at a time when Sasanian, Zoroastrian troops had conquered Eastern Roman cities such as Petra, and when there had been a resurgence of pastoralist, sometimes pagan, power. These upheavals of 614 and after were narrated in works such as Antōnios’ biography of Saint Geōrgios of Choziba, which spoke of monks taking refuge in caves and in “Arabia.” These anecdotes about Sasanian military and pagan Bedouin raids on monasteries in the 610s are leant support by excavations in the Near East. The Petra Papyri and the archeology of the city allows us to understand its Christian culture and the dramatic disruption that struck it early in the seventh century. Unlike the other versions of the story of the Sleepers, the quranic telling does not contain the prologue about the persecuting emperor Decius and his relationship with the pious youth. They flee an abstract, if inquisitional, paganism when they take refuge in the cave, and this way of relating the story makes it more timeless and relevant to contemporaries. The quranic story is a vindication of steadfast faith and refusal to bow to a hegemonic heathenism, one theme of the Syriac and Latin versions. Their unwavering belief is rewarded when the youth wake up in a post-pagan Christian society. Unlike the surviving Syriac and Latin versions of the story, the Qur’an’s version is not vindication of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. For the author of the Qur’ān, the miracle demonstrated that mortals find it difficult to believe in God’s power to alter ordinary space-time. The miracle not only rewarded resolute faith but tested which of the youth would be able to see immediately that God had arranged for them to sleep their way, over centuries, into a Christian society that had left behind paganism. In the context, this motif may have implied a pledge to the Christians of Transjordan that the renewed persecution they suffered under Sasanian rule might seem interminable, but that in fact it would pass quickly.